Being a lawyer is a funny. Practicing law is funny. The law is funny. People who break the law can be funny. But running a law firm is serious business. With hundreds of billable hours at stake. To the biggest clients the law firm needs to be seen as professional, and capable to handle the hard cases that are thrown at them.
So with all this seriousness how would a serious law firm use cartoons in their marketing? Well the sheer fact that the law or running a law firm is serious is the reason to have a cartoon.
Cartoons have the power to lighten the mood of difficult topics. The law is a very broad and expansive topic and no one man can know it all. It’s also not exciting to talk about if you are a business owner. Has anyone actually read the fine print on a contract that is not a lawyer? A good example as to where a law firm could use a cartoon in their marketing is if the large law firm is publishing a monthly newsletter that goes out to their clients. Let’s pretend that tax time is coming up and the law firm wanted to enlighten their readers as to new tax laws that have come out since last year and the business owner should know about them. Well I can’t think of something more boring than taxes, but there are only sure things in this world for everyone. Death and taxes. This law firm could use a cartoon to lighten the mood to the reader by say doing a cartoon making light of the fact that tax time is here. The tax cartoon can make fun of taxes themselves and the reader can relate to this since they are tax payers. The reader might spend an extra 10 seconds noodling over the cartoon and may be inspired enough to read what the article might have to say. The cartoon has done its job.
This same principal can be applied to lawyers who might be making a presentation to a select audience. The lawyer might open up with a cartoon that illustrates the point of the presentation. If the crowd had never hear of you, you only have seconds during the start of the presentation to capture their attention before they make a judgement about you. This is why many speakers open up with some jokes to the crowd as if to say, “Hey I’m a great guy!” or “Look at me! I’m funny!”
There is no shortage of cartoons out there and there is no shortage of jokes about lawyers. My advice to a lawyer is to find a cartoonist where they like the style of drawing and their humor. The style should be clean, easy to read and business like. My other advice is to not steal from the internet. If its clear that you stole the cartoon from the internet, how are you going to cut corners being their lawyer? You want a good clean image free from low resolution internet images (unless of course you output is an email marketing or website).
No comments yet.